Basically, the plot of this movie is that a couple is in love, and then one of them forgets the other. The viewer is made to sympathize with the lover whose partner is now effectively dead, and the story ends with the couple re-uniting (this should not be a spoiler because it should be entirely predictable to anyone who can predict the sun rising). This is meant to be seen as good.
If commenters in this thread were watching that movie, would they think “Man, it’s so dumb of them to want their past self to influence their future self. How do convince someone totally different from you to do things that you want them to do?”
The reason why this is actually a much easier problem is that if I suddenly lost two years of my memory, I would share N-2 years of memory with the person who I had been a day before losing those memories. I do not share N-2 years of memory with anyone else.
If life is a search process, then a backup is just a list of visited nodes that resulted in a “hit”, possibly with a blacklist of nodes that lead us down a garden path. For example, if I were to write a letter to myself to be delivered if I lost one year’s worth of memory, it would contain:
A list of all relevant computer passwords I currently have
The decision process I eventually used to come to a decision I liked about where to go to grad school
Narrative stories about several experiences I had which caused me to believe certain things
The distilled morals of the stories in #3
Of course, this would be highly compressed. Since I don’t know when I’m going to lose memory, it would probably be best to just do #3 on a daily basis, for the delta of experiences since the last day (people call this a “journal”). I think I can generally trust this record to move myself from a single day to the single next day, so by induction this works for an arbitrary number of days, though if I lost ten years it would be almost intractable to get them back.
I think people in this thread are coming at the problem from the wrong standpoint.
Once I was trapped on an airplane and had to watch the movie The Vow—sadly, they only had the 2012 romantic drama rather than the beautiful cinematic celebration of the strength of the Soviet people.
Basically, the plot of this movie is that a couple is in love, and then one of them forgets the other. The viewer is made to sympathize with the lover whose partner is now effectively dead, and the story ends with the couple re-uniting (this should not be a spoiler because it should be entirely predictable to anyone who can predict the sun rising). This is meant to be seen as good.
If commenters in this thread were watching that movie, would they think “Man, it’s so dumb of them to want their past self to influence their future self. How do convince someone totally different from you to do things that you want them to do?”
The reason why this is actually a much easier problem is that if I suddenly lost two years of my memory, I would share N-2 years of memory with the person who I had been a day before losing those memories. I do not share N-2 years of memory with anyone else.
If life is a search process, then a backup is just a list of visited nodes that resulted in a “hit”, possibly with a blacklist of nodes that lead us down a garden path. For example, if I were to write a letter to myself to be delivered if I lost one year’s worth of memory, it would contain:
A list of all relevant computer passwords I currently have
The decision process I eventually used to come to a decision I liked about where to go to grad school
Narrative stories about several experiences I had which caused me to believe certain things
The distilled morals of the stories in #3
Of course, this would be highly compressed. Since I don’t know when I’m going to lose memory, it would probably be best to just do #3 on a daily basis, for the delta of experiences since the last day (people call this a “journal”). I think I can generally trust this record to move myself from a single day to the single next day, so by induction this works for an arbitrary number of days, though if I lost ten years it would be almost intractable to get them back.